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When a politician begins a speech in Ottawa by acknowledging that we’re on unceded Algonquin territory, Jason Arbour winces. They never mention the Mohawk people of Hull, his ancestors, the subject of his life’s lonely research.
“I want to represent those who are not here and cannot speak no more, in a respectful way, and being culturally sensitive to those other nations that have a vested interest in our territory,” Arbour says. “My most important goal is to share our interest with the public without offending anybody, and to get the recognition we deserve as Indigenous people in the heart of Canada’s capital.”
Arbour lives in Renfrew now but Britannia was home when he was a kid. He spent years in foster care as a youth and never finished high school, he says. For a while, he lived with his grandfather, who’d once lived with his own grandfather and would tell stories about the Indian reserve the old man had grown up on in Hull, with other Mohawks. It was just north of the Chaudière Falls, a central site for ceremonies and gatherings long before recorded history.
The much-tamed Chaudière Falls, as they appeared in 1936, looking westward. The site where Jason Arbour believes his Mohawk ancestors lived on a reserve is at the bottom right, between the curved road (now Promenade du Portage) and the storage yard.
Source: Canada Dept. of Interior, 1936, Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3328645.
“So you could see the word-of-mouth and how it was passed on. There was a great oral history and a lot of it cannot be romanticized, no matter how hard you try,” Arbour says. The community was small, enveloped by a growing population of Europeans, and eventually gone.
Ottawa is on traditional Algonquin territory but it’s close to a fuzzy edge: Montreal is traditional Mohawk territory, part of an expanse that runs west up the St. Lawrence valley and grazes the eastern edge of Ottawa. But there was never a well-surveyed border. Like French- and English-speaking settlers, Algonquins and Mohawks sometimes lived separately in peace, sometimes warred and sometimes lived together, especially for trade and when shared Christianity erased old cultural distinctions.
Arbour is Algonquin on his mother’s side, Mohawk on his father’s. He tries to live both traditions and pass them on to his five sons. That’s how he came to be charged in 2008 for hunting illegally in Quebec’s Papineau-Labelle wildlife reserve with a bow, on what he said was a coming-of-age ceremonial hunt with one of his sons.
Non-status Indians can claim Aboriginal hunting rights if they can show they’re carrying on an ancestral tradition, and Arbour believed he and his children were doing that. He set out to prove it. By himself — he couldn’t afford a lawyer. He had the stories but he needed much more.
The 1871 Canadian census template included a box for enumerators to mark down residents’ ethnic origins. Arbour perused the pages for Hull online.
“I’m seeing ‘English,’ ‘French,’ ‘Gaelic,’ ‘Gaelic,’ ‘French,’ ‘English,’ and all of a sudden — ‘Iroquois’! I was like, ‘Jackpot!'” he says.
A page from Canada?’s 1871 census shows people living in Hull whose ethnicity was initially recorded as ?Iroquois,? then changed to ?Indian.? This is among the documents Jason Arbour says proves his ancestors were Mohawks living on a reserve there, whose history has been all but erased since they were evicted in about 1900.
Source: Library and Archives Canada
Starting on Page 113 of the records for District 93, West Ottawa (Quebec), there they are in the census-taker’s ornate script: Louis Laforce’s family, Joachin Menharakete’s, two households named Anenhariston. Each family had its origin marked down as “Iroquois,” then crossed out and replaced with the more generic “Indian.”
“Iroquois” is itself a broad label, the French name for a large confederacy of Indigenous nations that included the Mohawk as its easternmost members. Sixty-six people, one after the next, indicating they were all neighbours.
They’re listed as living in “shanties,” working as labourers and hunters. Most were illiterate, the census-taker wrote; some could “read and write in Indian.”
In the archives of the federal government’s Indian Branch, Arbour found a doctor’s account of an 1872 smallpox outbreak that ripped through the settlement on the “northern shore of the Ottawa.” He found a land survey of lower Hull, showing the holdings of the heirs of Ruggles Wright, Hull founder Philemon Wright’s son; it has a triangular parcel marked “Reserve” north of the river, about where the Portage IV government office block stands today.
Place du Portage
The community was evicted, Arbour says, when one of Ruggles Wright’s children asserted ownership of the reserve land after the great fire of 1900 burned the residents out.
“The more I started to investigate, the more the collection compiled. Eventually, I had a great case before the courts,” Arbour says.
Judge Christine Auger agreed. Proving your connection to a community that was deliberately obliterated is hard, but Arbour had managed it compellingly. The government couldn’t use its mistreatment of Arbour’s ancestors a century ago to say he had no Aboriginal rights now, Auger’s 2012 decision said.
“The extremely detailed and compelling documentary evidence presented by Mr. Arbour as well as his testimony concerning his ancestors living in the Township of Hull convinces the court of the existence of the historic rights-bearing community of Kaniengehaga (People of the Place of the Flint) from Tsit-Kanaja as well as Mr. Arbour’s link to that band,” Auger wrote.
“There is no doubt that there was a historical community in the Township of Hull to which Mr. Arbour’s ancestors belonged,” the judge emphasized a little later. “This community was disbanded and never relocated as a group.”
Arbour lost anyway: The judge didn’t accept his argument that a link to a community in Hull gave him a legal right to hunt out of season in the wildlife sanctuary a couple of hundred kilometres away. He appealed that all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada and lost. But for a judge to say that this settlement existed, that it’s consistent with the stories of Arbour’s grandfather’s grandfather, was life-changing nevertheless.
“The most important thing is the heritage,” he says. “We were kicked off our reserve, we were kicked off our land; it doesn’t mean we’re not living here in plain sight. We’re in Kanata, we’re in Vanier, we’re all over.”
What that heritage means now, is hard to know.
Arbour got a meeting with staff at Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada on Oct. 30 and presented them his dossier, which the government calls “an initial step in Canada’s claim assessment process.” They’ve reviewed what he gave them and want to talk about it in more detail, a department spokeswoman said.
The government “is aware of some evidence of Iroquois/Mohawk individuals in the Ottawa-Hull region in the late 19th century,” she wrote in an email.
Chaudière Falls and the islands around it are legally complicated, with the Ontario-Quebec border running right through them. That’s a settler border, not an Indigenous people’s border, but it divides Algonquin groups in this area all the same.
The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, the major Algonquin band on the Quebec side, have made a land claim around the capital region that extends into Ontario, asserting that they were driven off their historical territory without an agreement or compensation. I called Chief Jean Guy White Duck of Kitigan Zibi to talk about Arbour and ask whether White Duck knew anything about a Mohawk history in Hull. He didn’t respond.
The Algonquins of Ontario have claimed the Ontario side as well, as part of a sweeping claim covering much of Eastern Ontario. Settling the claim with compensation is a drawn-out legal process but it’s moving toward a conclusion. Robert Potts, the Algonquins of Ontario’s chief negotiator and lawyer, said he has no comment now on the specifics of what Arbour says.
“As we continue our efforts to reach a final agreement, legitimate overlaps will be addressed in appropriate side agreements with First Nations who have demonstrable underlying aboriginal rights,” he said.
Arbour’s doesn’t have a legally recognized First Nation, though. He’s not part of a recognized Mohawk band. He can’t prove a link from Hull to today’s major Mohawk communities of Kanesatake or Kahnawake near Montreal, or Akwesasne near Cornwall. The oral history is thin. Documentary evidence fades out in names changed by force, lost records, neglect.
“I’m doing this out of my dining room with a computer,” he says.
Arbour says he’s not after a fight. He’s not saying there isn’t a rich Algonquin history here that includes Chaudière Falls, the islands and the river. He’s saying there was also a Mohawk settlement close by, one that was erased in law but that shouldn’t be erased in history.
The late Algonquin elder William Commanda.
When William Commanda was alive, Arbour says, the revered Algonquin elder and former Kitigan Zibi chief maintained a philosophy that all Indigenous people here were part of the same struggle.
“It was about bringing us together as one to fight the good fight and against colonization and to assert our right to sovereignty,” Arbour says. Since Commanda died in 2011, that sense has been lost, Arbour believes.
Of course, it’s also since Commanda died that “reconciliation” has become a national cause, and the islands below the falls became a billion-dollar development site. Developer Windmill has pledged to build a community that respects First Nations history. The very name Zibi is Algonquin for “river.” Arbour wants Mohawk heritage reflected as well as Algonquin.
“When I look out from the falls at the river, I see a lot of different fish,” he says. “I see pike, I see muskie, I see eel, I see catfish. What fish has title to that river? Does the pike have title, or does the muskie? That’s what I’m talking about — I’m a muskie, and they’re a pike.”
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“I want to represent those who are not here and cannot speak no more, in a respectful way, and being culturally sensitive to those other nations that have a vested interest in our territory,” Arbour says. “My most important goal is to share our interest with the public without offending anybody, and to get the recognition we deserve as Indigenous people in the heart of Canada’s capital.”
Arbour lives in Renfrew now but Britannia was home when he was a kid. He spent years in foster care as a youth and never finished high school, he says. For a while, he lived with his grandfather, who’d once lived with his own grandfather and would tell stories about the Indian reserve the old man had grown up on in Hull, with other Mohawks. It was just north of the Chaudière Falls, a central site for ceremonies and gatherings long before recorded history.
The much-tamed Chaudière Falls, as they appeared in 1936, looking westward. The site where Jason Arbour believes his Mohawk ancestors lived on a reserve is at the bottom right, between the curved road (now Promenade du Portage) and the storage yard.
Source: Canada Dept. of Interior, 1936, Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3328645.
“So you could see the word-of-mouth and how it was passed on. There was a great oral history and a lot of it cannot be romanticized, no matter how hard you try,” Arbour says. The community was small, enveloped by a growing population of Europeans, and eventually gone.
Ottawa is on traditional Algonquin territory but it’s close to a fuzzy edge: Montreal is traditional Mohawk territory, part of an expanse that runs west up the St. Lawrence valley and grazes the eastern edge of Ottawa. But there was never a well-surveyed border. Like French- and English-speaking settlers, Algonquins and Mohawks sometimes lived separately in peace, sometimes warred and sometimes lived together, especially for trade and when shared Christianity erased old cultural distinctions.
Arbour is Algonquin on his mother’s side, Mohawk on his father’s. He tries to live both traditions and pass them on to his five sons. That’s how he came to be charged in 2008 for hunting illegally in Quebec’s Papineau-Labelle wildlife reserve with a bow, on what he said was a coming-of-age ceremonial hunt with one of his sons.
Non-status Indians can claim Aboriginal hunting rights if they can show they’re carrying on an ancestral tradition, and Arbour believed he and his children were doing that. He set out to prove it. By himself — he couldn’t afford a lawyer. He had the stories but he needed much more.
The 1871 Canadian census template included a box for enumerators to mark down residents’ ethnic origins. Arbour perused the pages for Hull online.
“I’m seeing ‘English,’ ‘French,’ ‘Gaelic,’ ‘Gaelic,’ ‘French,’ ‘English,’ and all of a sudden — ‘Iroquois’! I was like, ‘Jackpot!'” he says.
A page from Canada?’s 1871 census shows people living in Hull whose ethnicity was initially recorded as ?Iroquois,? then changed to ?Indian.? This is among the documents Jason Arbour says proves his ancestors were Mohawks living on a reserve there, whose history has been all but erased since they were evicted in about 1900.
Source: Library and Archives Canada
Starting on Page 113 of the records for District 93, West Ottawa (Quebec), there they are in the census-taker’s ornate script: Louis Laforce’s family, Joachin Menharakete’s, two households named Anenhariston. Each family had its origin marked down as “Iroquois,” then crossed out and replaced with the more generic “Indian.”
“Iroquois” is itself a broad label, the French name for a large confederacy of Indigenous nations that included the Mohawk as its easternmost members. Sixty-six people, one after the next, indicating they were all neighbours.
They’re listed as living in “shanties,” working as labourers and hunters. Most were illiterate, the census-taker wrote; some could “read and write in Indian.”
In the archives of the federal government’s Indian Branch, Arbour found a doctor’s account of an 1872 smallpox outbreak that ripped through the settlement on the “northern shore of the Ottawa.” He found a land survey of lower Hull, showing the holdings of the heirs of Ruggles Wright, Hull founder Philemon Wright’s son; it has a triangular parcel marked “Reserve” north of the river, about where the Portage IV government office block stands today.
Place du Portage
The community was evicted, Arbour says, when one of Ruggles Wright’s children asserted ownership of the reserve land after the great fire of 1900 burned the residents out.
“The more I started to investigate, the more the collection compiled. Eventually, I had a great case before the courts,” Arbour says.
Judge Christine Auger agreed. Proving your connection to a community that was deliberately obliterated is hard, but Arbour had managed it compellingly. The government couldn’t use its mistreatment of Arbour’s ancestors a century ago to say he had no Aboriginal rights now, Auger’s 2012 decision said.
“The extremely detailed and compelling documentary evidence presented by Mr. Arbour as well as his testimony concerning his ancestors living in the Township of Hull convinces the court of the existence of the historic rights-bearing community of Kaniengehaga (People of the Place of the Flint) from Tsit-Kanaja as well as Mr. Arbour’s link to that band,” Auger wrote.
“There is no doubt that there was a historical community in the Township of Hull to which Mr. Arbour’s ancestors belonged,” the judge emphasized a little later. “This community was disbanded and never relocated as a group.”
Arbour lost anyway: The judge didn’t accept his argument that a link to a community in Hull gave him a legal right to hunt out of season in the wildlife sanctuary a couple of hundred kilometres away. He appealed that all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada and lost. But for a judge to say that this settlement existed, that it’s consistent with the stories of Arbour’s grandfather’s grandfather, was life-changing nevertheless.
“The most important thing is the heritage,” he says. “We were kicked off our reserve, we were kicked off our land; it doesn’t mean we’re not living here in plain sight. We’re in Kanata, we’re in Vanier, we’re all over.”
What that heritage means now, is hard to know.
Arbour got a meeting with staff at Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada on Oct. 30 and presented them his dossier, which the government calls “an initial step in Canada’s claim assessment process.” They’ve reviewed what he gave them and want to talk about it in more detail, a department spokeswoman said.
The government “is aware of some evidence of Iroquois/Mohawk individuals in the Ottawa-Hull region in the late 19th century,” she wrote in an email.
Chaudière Falls and the islands around it are legally complicated, with the Ontario-Quebec border running right through them. That’s a settler border, not an Indigenous people’s border, but it divides Algonquin groups in this area all the same.
The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, the major Algonquin band on the Quebec side, have made a land claim around the capital region that extends into Ontario, asserting that they were driven off their historical territory without an agreement or compensation. I called Chief Jean Guy White Duck of Kitigan Zibi to talk about Arbour and ask whether White Duck knew anything about a Mohawk history in Hull. He didn’t respond.
The Algonquins of Ontario have claimed the Ontario side as well, as part of a sweeping claim covering much of Eastern Ontario. Settling the claim with compensation is a drawn-out legal process but it’s moving toward a conclusion. Robert Potts, the Algonquins of Ontario’s chief negotiator and lawyer, said he has no comment now on the specifics of what Arbour says.
“As we continue our efforts to reach a final agreement, legitimate overlaps will be addressed in appropriate side agreements with First Nations who have demonstrable underlying aboriginal rights,” he said.
Arbour’s doesn’t have a legally recognized First Nation, though. He’s not part of a recognized Mohawk band. He can’t prove a link from Hull to today’s major Mohawk communities of Kanesatake or Kahnawake near Montreal, or Akwesasne near Cornwall. The oral history is thin. Documentary evidence fades out in names changed by force, lost records, neglect.
“I’m doing this out of my dining room with a computer,” he says.
Arbour says he’s not after a fight. He’s not saying there isn’t a rich Algonquin history here that includes Chaudière Falls, the islands and the river. He’s saying there was also a Mohawk settlement close by, one that was erased in law but that shouldn’t be erased in history.
The late Algonquin elder William Commanda.
When William Commanda was alive, Arbour says, the revered Algonquin elder and former Kitigan Zibi chief maintained a philosophy that all Indigenous people here were part of the same struggle.
“It was about bringing us together as one to fight the good fight and against colonization and to assert our right to sovereignty,” Arbour says. Since Commanda died in 2011, that sense has been lost, Arbour believes.
Of course, it’s also since Commanda died that “reconciliation” has become a national cause, and the islands below the falls became a billion-dollar development site. Developer Windmill has pledged to build a community that respects First Nations history. The very name Zibi is Algonquin for “river.” Arbour wants Mohawk heritage reflected as well as Algonquin.
“When I look out from the falls at the river, I see a lot of different fish,” he says. “I see pike, I see muskie, I see eel, I see catfish. What fish has title to that river? Does the pike have title, or does the muskie? That’s what I’m talking about — I’m a muskie, and they’re a pike.”
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
